Toronto, Ontario, is Canada’s largest metropolitan area as well as its primary business center.Toronto leads Canadian cities in printing and publishing. Television and movie production are important as well. With more than 5 million people, the city has been growing for decades. For a time, Toronto managed this growth by stretching up, but soon it began to sprawl out.

Building Up and Filling In Limits Sprawl Toronto has a long history. It began as a French fur-trading post in colonial times. Later, Americans who had been loyal to the British in the American Revolution and fled to Canada founded a city there. In the 1800s, Toronto became a factory town and later still it developed into a banking center. By the 1960s, though, its urban core was run down.Something had to be done to keep the downtown alive.

In 1965, Toronto announced a plan to renew its urban core. The plan encouraged infill over sprawl. Infill involves filling in empty or run-down parts of a city with new development. Building an apartment high-rise on an empty lot is an example of infill. So is building a shopping mall on the site of an old amusement park.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Toronto rebuilt its urban core. The new buildings included some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. These towers had offices, shops, museums, parking, and housing.

By 1999, officials in Toronto knew they had to do something to control sprawl. They considered many ideas. One was to reduce sprawl by encouraging smart growth ideas like mixed-use development. Another idea was to ban all growth in rural areas. A third was to allow a lot of growth in part of the city while limiting it in the rest.Whatever was decided would shape Toronto’s future.